after several attempts i finally had success with adding my AIM account (as in getting the hundreds of authorization mesgs, one for each contact + a confirmation). i used a server from this list: http://www.xmpp.net/bycountry.shtml working my way up in my country until i found one that had open registration (as evidenced by Register not being greyed out and having proper response when right-clicking it in Psi after entering it in under Service Discovery). deepdarc.com was what i used, fwiw.